I got stranded in Kodiak by inclement weather last week, but there was a silver lining to being weathered in for a couple of extra days. I got a new perspective on how Louise Stutes is running her political campaign for the Alaska Senate. She is running two distinctly different campaigns in Kodiak and in Homer, and there is a very good reason why: it all comes down to the probability of a Ranked Choice Voting runoff in her race.
Kodiak and Homer are the two largest communities in their respective House districts 5 & 6, which comprise Senate District C. You might expect Stutes to present a fairly unified message to the voters in both communities. However, she isn’t.
When Stutes meets with voters in Homer, she is trying to appeal to Democrat voters and independents who lean left. She meets with voters at the Democratic campaign headquarters and avoids using the resources of the District 6 Republican Party. Stutes’s strategy in Homer is to find support among the political left, and her efforts have paid off. When you see Stutes campaign signs around Homer, they are firmly planted among Democrats and other left-aligned candidates. While she is a registered Republican, in Homer Stutes is campaigning like she is the only Democrat on the ballot.
It is a different story down in Kodiak. Kodiak is in House District 5 and, as can be seen from the data in Table 1, Kodiak is a very conservative town. For the last 10 years, conservative Republican candidates have an average net advantage over Democrats of 15%. You must be a conservative Republican to get elected in Kodiak, which is why Stutes doesn’t play footsie with the liberals down there. In Kodiak, Stutes pretends to be a true conservative Republican, and the proof is in the yard signs. All over Kodiak, I saw clusters of Republican supporters with Louise Stutes yard signs placed right alongside those for Dan Sullivan and Nick Begich. Republicans in Kodiak support Stutes, but it is a different story for the Kodiak Democrats. They also have clusters of signs in their yards supporting candidates they prefer, but unlike in Homer, none of the Kodiak Democrats include a sign for Stutes.
There is a very easy explanation for why Stutes is running a campaign strategy appealing to different voters in these communities. Based on the primary election results, this race is very close, and there will likely not be an outright winner on election day. As in the primary election, Heath Smith from Homer and Louise Stutes from Kodiak will receive the most votes, but neither of them will get enough to win outright. This election will be determined by an automatic RCV runoff, and it is how the votes for the third candidate in this race are distributed that will determine the winner. That individual is Carrie Harris, and she lives in Anchor Point, which is located in House District 6 near Homer.
Carrie Harris ran for the State Senate once before, in 2016 as an independent. She took a far-left position on most issues back then and gave as her only previous experience in public office her membership on the Homer Cannabis Advisory Commission. While Harris has tweaked her campaign biography slightly for this year’s election, she still holds some pretty liberal positions and is clearly not your typical conservative Republican. Of the three candidates running, Harris is the furthest to the left politically. However, Harris did receive 12.89% of the votes in the August Primary Election, enough votes to prevent either Louise Stutes or Heath Smith from winning outright.
The majority of Harris’s votes came from the Homer area. So, when Louise Stutes campaigns with Democrats in Homer, she is actually trying to appeal to those ~13% of the voters who support the liberal Carrie Harris. That is the reason for Louise Stutes’s dual campaign strategy. She is running as the liberal alternative in Homer, trying to pick up Carrie Harris voters, while simultaneously trying to fool Kodiak voters into thinking she remains a true conservative.
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Fortunately, we have Stutes’s record in the State House to show voters what she really believes. She supported the original passage of ranked-choice voting and opposes its repeal. Stutes joined with Democrats to form a governing caucus in the House and will do so again if elected to the Senate. Stutes supports even bigger increases in the BSA (used to fund public education) and supports a new defined-benefit retirement program for schoolteachers. She is willing to pay for these expensive programs by taking your PFD. Stutes has also been a big proponent of the controversial pollock trawl fishery based in Kodiak, which has been accused of devastating wild fish stocks.
It is clear that in her political beliefs, Louise Stutes aligns with the Democratic Party. However, to get elected as a state senator, she is trying to appeal to both sides of the political aisle, simultaneously pretending to be either a liberal or a conservative, depending on which House District she is campaigning in. By doing so, Stutes is being dishonest, and if the voters see through her charade, Stutes is at risk of losing this election.
The views expressed here are those of Greg Sarber. Read more Sarber posts at his Seward’s Folly substack.
